US closes in on 200,000 virus deaths, weeks before election
WASHINGTON, United States — The United States edged close to registering 200,000 Covid-19 deaths on Monday, the latest grim milestone for the country just weeks before voters decide if President Donald Trump will stay in office.
According to a rolling tally by Johns Hopkins University, 199,743 Americans have died and 6.8 million have been confirmed infected.
The US has had the world's highest official death toll for months, ahead of Brazil and India, with 136,895 and 87,882 deaths respectively.
Overall, the US accounts for four percent of the world's population and 20 percent of its coronavirus deaths, while its daily fatality rate relative to the overall population is four times greater than that of the European Union.
Critics say the statistics expose the Trump administration's failure to meet its sternest test ahead of the November 3 election.
"Due to Donald Trump's lies and incompetence in the past six months, (we) have seen one of the gravest losses of American life in history," his Democratic rival Joe Biden charged on Monday.
"With this crisis, a real crisis, a crisis that required serious presidential leadership, he just wasn't up to it. He froze. He failed to act. He panicked. And America has paid the worst price of any nation in the world."
Trump insisted on "Fox and Friends" Monday that the United States was "rounding the corner with or without a vaccine."
But the president has high hopes that the swift approval of a vaccine will boost his reelection chances.
"I would say that you'll have (a vaccine) long before the end of the year, maybe by the end of October," he told Fox, adding that his priority was "total safety -- it's number one."
Trump has set even more ambitious goals, stating that by April of next year, most Americans who want to be immunized will have a vaccine.
Most experts argue that betting on vaccines is not a viable strategy.
Without adhering to masks, distancing and contact-tracing, and without ramping up testing, tens of thousands more could still die before life returns to normal in the US.
"What we need to do is shift... towards a more screening approach that's proactive to test asymptomatic individuals," Harvard surgeon and health policy researcher Thomas Tsai told AFP.
He said the government should approve rapid, at-home antigen tests, which it has been reluctant to do so far, and which would require the government to pay for it instead of insurance companies.
"Covid will be the third leading cause of death this year in the US," tweeted Tom Frieden, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) under former president Barack Obama.
"The staggering death toll from the virus is a reflection of a failed national response, but it's not too late to turn it around."
Only the number of people who died from heart disease and cancer will be higher.
Series of errors
It's likely that the US actually crossed 200,000 deaths in July, said Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Institute, citing the excess mortality rate.
The initial lack of tests led to an undercount of the virus' toll.
"We are the outlier to have been caught totally flat-footed with no testing, and just not learning from mistakes," Topol added, explaining why the virus continues to kill more than in Europe, despite improvements in how the disease is managed in hospitals.
Belgium, Spain and Britain still have higher total death rates per capita than the United States, but were able to partly control the first wave of outbreaks through near-total lockdowns.
"We never got adequate suppression, and yet we're opening everything and trying to make believe that everything is just great," said Topol.
Adoption of public health measures remains mixed across the US.
In many cities, students have gone back to school virtually, the indoor areas of bars and restaurants remain closed, and mask use is up.
But hotspots are still flaring up, currently in the Midwest and on college campuses that returned to in-person learning.
Critics say Trump abdicated responsibility and left it to the state governors to deal with the crisis and decide on lockdowns.
"We had a crazy quilt of responses across the country that totally confused the average person," William Schaffner, a health policy professor at Vanderbilt University, told AFP.
"We needed a unified, coherent, strong, national response."
The public health system will be tested as we move into fall and winter, said Harvard epidemiologist Michael Mina.
Anticipating a "twindemic" of coronavirus and flu, officials are stocking up on a record number of flu vaccines.
Follow this page for updates on a mysterious pneumonia outbreak that has struck dozens of people in China.
New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins says on Sunday that he had contracted COVID-19, testing positive at a key point in his flailing campaign for re-election.
Hipkins saYS on his official social media feed that he would need to isolate for up to five days -- less than two weeks before his country's general election.
The leader of the centre-left Labour Party said he started to experience cold symptoms on Saturday and had cancelled most of his weekend engagements. — AFP
The World Health Organization and US health authorities say Friday they are closely monitoring a new variant of COVID-19, although the potential impact of BA.2.86 is currently unknown.
The WHO classified the new variant as one under surveillance "due to the large number (more than 30) of spike gene mutations it carries", it wrote in a bulletin about the pandemic late Thursday.
So far, the variant has only been detected in Israel, Denmark and the United States. — AFP
The World Health Organization says on Friday that the number of new COVID-19 cases reported worldwide rose by 80% in the last month, days after designating a new "variant of interest".
The WHO declared in May that Covid is no longer a global health emergency, but has warned that the virus will continue to circulate and mutate, causing occasional spikes in infections, hospitalisations and deaths.
In its weekly update, the UN agency said that nations reported nearly 1.5 million new cases from July 10 to August 6, an 80% increase compared to the previous 28 days. — AFP
The head of US intelligence says that there was no evidence that the COVID-19 virus was created in the Chinese government's Wuhan research lab.
In a declassified report, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) says they had no information backing recent claims that three scientists at the lab were some of the very first infected with COVID-19 and may have created the virus themselves.
Drawing on intelligence collected by various member agencies of the US intelligence community (IC), the ODNI report says some scientists at the Wuhan lab had done genetic engineering of coronaviruses similar to COVID-19. — AFP
Boris Johnson deliberately misled MPs over Covid lockdown-breaking parties in Downing Street when he was prime minister, a UK parliament committee ruled on Thursday.
The cross-party Privileges Committee said Johnson, 58, would have been suspended as an MP for 90 days for "repeated contempts (of parliament) and for seeking to undermine the parliamentary process".
But he avoided any formal sanction by his peers in the House of Commons by resigning as an MP last week.
In his resignation statement last Friday, Johnson pre-empted publication of the committee's conclusions, claiming a political stitch-up, even though the body has a majority from his own party.
He was unrepentant again on Thursday, accusing the committee of being "anti-democratic... to bring about what is intended to be the final knife-thrust in a protracted political assassination".
Calling it "beneath contempt", he said it was "for the people of this to decide who sits in parliament, not Harriet Harman", the veteran opposition Labour MP who chaired the seven-person committee. — AFP
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